Unlocking the value of medical case reports: BioMed Central launches Cases Database

BioMed Central the open access publisher today announced the launch of a valuable new medical resource, Cases Database. Cases Database is a freely accessible and continuously updated tool, developed by BioMed Central, which allows clinicians, researchers, teachers and patients to explore thousands of peer-reviewed medical case reports from multiple journal publishers, including BioMed Central, Springer and BMJ Group.

The launch of BioMed Central's open access Journal of Medical Case Reports (JMCR) in 2007 drew attention to the valuable role that case reports can play in advancing medical understanding. Since then, case report publishing has become a burgeoning field and with the introduction of Cases Database, BioMed Central is now making the universe of published case reports even easier to explore.

Matt Cockerill, BioMed Central's Managing Director explains "Our vision, when we launched JMCR, was that case reports would have much more value if they could be assembled together in large numbers and made easy to find and compare. Cases Database delivers on that vision."

By bringing many thousands of case reports together, Cases Database adds value to individual reports, allowing comparison of similar cases and helping to highlight trends and patterns which may help researchers to develop hypotheses which can then be tested by systematic research.

To aid discovery, all cases reports in Case Database are annotated using text-mining, which extracts clinically relevant information such as age, sex, ethnicity, symptom, intervention or medication using standard controlled vocabularies.

Professor Michael Kidd AM, Editor-in-Chief of JMCR said, "Case reports have the potential to improve our understanding of clinical medicine and expand medical knowledge. By bringing similar case reports together, through the Cases Database, researchers and clinicians can start to look for new knowledge – new associations, new side effects, new thoughts about disease processes, new understandings about the impact of disease on our patients and our communities. This is an exciting development and is critical to the advancement of clinical medicine."

To make Cases Database as comprehensive as possible, BioMed Central is working with multiple publishers to include case reports, both open access and non-open access, from hundreds of journals. The database already includes data on more than 4000 case reports from BMJ Case Reports, published by BMJ Group, with further such partnerships under development.

As Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, commented "Because most patients these days have not one condition but many we have to move beyond randomised trials, which usually exclude patients with comorbidities. A database of case reports will be invaluable in moving us forward."

Provided by BioMed Central